Dive Brief:

• Letting students take the lead on technology initiatives can tap into existing talent, save class time for content, empower students, allow them to showcase their tech skills, and prompt real-world lessons in communication.
• Students at Creekside Middle School in Patterson, CA, host a biannual conference called Tech Boost, where young experts create presentations for their peers on topics like coding, video creation and web page and application design, according to The Modesto Bee.
• In Burlington, MA, technology specialist Jennifer Scheffer says students get course credit to staff the district help desk, learning customer service and IT skills while supporting six schools and more than 4,000 devices, according to an article for ISTE.

Dive Insight:

Peer-to-peer learning can be an important way to empower students who are doing the teaching and make progress with students who are benefiting from the peer instruction. Students might know better the frame of mind in which their peers are approaching a problem and they have a shared vocabulary to describe concepts. In some scenarios, this setup can be even more beneficial than additional instruction from a teacher.

Opportunities like the ones in California and Massachusetts also reflect a trend toward giving students more agency during the course of the school day. Elsewhere, teachers are providing students “playlists” to organize their learning while maintaining elements of choice and supporting student decision-making through project-based learning.